ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

I was just plodging about the internet the other day, thinking about how I enjoy writing and really ought to put a bit more effort into trying to write some fiction. Obviously, once I’ve done that, the harder part is persuading someone to give me money for it, but one thing at a time, yeah?
I [...]

Read: Creative writing (thanks to the BBC) »

Finally, a book meme that asks a little more than “list your 10 favourite books” or “here’s a big list of books, which ones have you read?”.
One of the things I do frequently is to browse the blogrolls of the bloggers on my blogroll. In this case, I wandered over to Stephen Lang’s site, [...]

Read: Book Meme With A Difference »

Hilary Mantel’s highly original and very odd novel received much praise when it was published in 2005. Somehow it has managed to escape my attention until nowStephen Lang: Booked Out
My fellow blogger Stephen Lang wrote the above in March of this year. At the time, I commented that I’d picked the book up a couple [...]

Read: Mantel Piece »

I read a lot. It’s not uncommon for me to sometimes read two novels in one day. So I get through a fair few books.
Quite a while ago, I came across a book by a chap called Michael Connelly called ‘The Poet’, which covers an FBI investigation into a serial killer. It was all right, [...]

Read: Bish, Bash, Bosch »

I read comics. Well, specifically I read the sci-fi comic 2000 AD. It’s not a comic in the sense of the Dandy or the Beano: it’s more of the style of stuff that is called a graphic novel: you can get quite complex plots broken down over a number of weeks, they might deal with [...]

Read: 2000 AD Playing Cards »

I’m reading a book called Quirkology by Professor Richard Wiseman. He looks at a lot of studies of quirky little things: how good people are at assessing whether or not someone is lying, how easy it is to suggest memories of events that never happened and so on. Oh, and that I was born in [...]

Read: Quirky, and mostly scientific »

I bought a book about three years ago and finished it just the other week. That’s not because I’m a particularly slow reader (in fact, generally the opposite), but because the book was the first book in a trilogy, and I didn’t want to start reading it until I’d got the other two books.
The problem [...]

Read: The Liveship Traders »

I’ve been reading John O’Farrell’s book An Utterly Impartial History Of Britain, and I’m quite some way through it. Basically, it covers the period from 43 A.D. (or thereabouts) to 1945, and I’ve reached the end of the First World War, so I think I should in a reasonable position to make some judgements of [...]

Read: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain »

No, this isn’t me “stepping out of the sideboard” (I’m heterosexual, and if you can’t handle that, well that’s your problem, not mine), it’s a book review of a piece of chick-lit fiction with that title. I’ve already posted this on my Facebook visual bookshelf thingummy which is quite a nice application, but I thought [...]

Read: Remind Me Again Why I Need A Man »

I spent about six and a half hours travelling by train last week, and obviously I had some important decisions that I needed to make.
Like which books am I taking?
It’s a tricky question. I’ll need more than one book for six hours travelling time, but what books I’ll actually want to read will depend somewhat [...]

Read: Hot Blood And Pies »